Meet the winners of the Swisscom StartUp Challenge 2019

Yesterday the five winners of the Swisscom Startup Challenge were selected out of the ten finalists. The start-ups not only needed smart ideas and a convincing business model to impress the panel, they also had to show team spirit and determination. The panel were particularly impressed by the following start-ups: CREAL3D, PXL Vision, People-Analytix AG, DeepCode and Gmelius. The award was handed over by Swisscom CEO Urs Schaeppi (picture left).

CREAL3D is developing the next-generation of smart glasses. Its projector creates hologram-like images with true optical depth, eliminating the eyestrain and nausea often caused by today’s devices, enhancing immersion, extending comfortable usage time and allowing conflict-less mixing of virtual and real worlds.

PXL Vision developed Daego, enabling the online verification of users’ identity to help companies fasten the process of onboarding customers. End customers can onboard taking a picture of an identity card and a video selfie. PXL’s customers include Sunrise and SwissSign with the SwissID, among others.

People-Analytix AG combines a unique database, artificial intelligence and analytical forecasting methods to provide individuals and organisations with virtual career advice, skills gap analysis and relevant labour market trends. People-Analytix is making an important contribution to overcoming the upcoming challenges in today’s working world. The Zurich-based company was founded in Dec 2017.

DeepCode is the platform for AI-powered code reviews. VC-backed ETH spin-off DeepCode brings the knowledge of the global development community to every software developer. Its bot uses machine learning to process millions of commits in software projects and learns how to find many more critical bugs/vulnerabilities in software code than other tools.

With Gmelius Gmail becomes a work hub for communication, collaboration and workflow automation with real-time syncing across all team members and devices, web & mobile. Gmelius is already trusted by more than 50k teams to manage customers and project pipelines from beginning to end.

Since the launch of the Swisscom StartUp Challenge in 2013, over 1,140 start-ups have applied to take part. This year, the challenge attracted entries from 289 start-ups – a new record. 69% of the entrants were from German-speaking Switzerland, 26% from French-speaking Switzerland and 5% from Italian-speaking Switzerland. They come from such diverse fields as Artificial Intelligence, ICT / Cloud Services, IoT / Robotics and FinTech / Crypto Finance, Blockchain, Digital Marketing, Drones and Cyber Security.

The five winners were selecte by a panel of experts comprising Roger Wüthrich-Hasenböhler (Chief Digital Officer, Swisscom), Christoph Aeschlimann (Head of Network and IT at Swisscom), Stefan Kuentz (Swisscom Ventures), Nanja Strecker (Managing Director at ESA BIC Switzerland) and Beat Schillig (CEO of programme partner Venturelab).